An Aptitude For Solitude

On my way to Back to School Night, the horizon peeked out through the open car window. I smelled the ocean and pictured myself for a moment out on that ocean with nothing surrounding me but the sea, watching the sun rise and the sun set for four days in a row.

I realized how much my soul needs some version of extended solitude. Some people are made for that kind of thing, some think it torture. For some it cleanses their souls from all the sludge that builds up on land and brings them back more ready to attack life, for some it drives them to madness.

I am a member of the former group. I have always had an amazing aptitude for solitude. It is what often has made me forgo going out with a group of friends to finish a project at home. It is what allowed me to survive one very lonely freshman year of college where I would go for days on end without talking to anyone except for the guy who made my sandwiches for lunch.

It is, also, what has driven me to plan this solo adventure, to push the boundaries of what is thought possible for a diabetic, and what has caused me to spend countless hours planning and arranging and seeking out sponsors to get it off the ground.

Many people have asked me why I couldn't bring someone else along with me. A few were concerned for my safety, a few trying to solve the problem of finding a boat to charter from companies that seemed to outlaw solo sailors I tell them there is an extreme difference between sailing solo and sailing with crew. It's in the freedom to indulge every whim right when it hits. To go out as far from land as I want without having to consider another, to see what I want to see, to stop where I want to stop, and to drive on when I want to meet a goal.

It is so unlike my life on land, where it is always a compromise, when I am pulled in a million directions other than the one I truly want to go. Work pulls. Bills pull. Even having to choose a place to eat involves balancing the needs and wants of everyone else. Tony needs to eat clean foods and needs to eat in the next fifteen minutes. Shea won't eat meat. Eli will only eat foods that involve begin dipped in ketchup. I need to sit in a place that involves direct sunlight on my face and all of this has to be done for under twenty dollars.

But, it is not so when you are solo. It is all me. It is simple to balance the things that I want. One opinion to sway the vote, one need to satisfy, one desire to fulfill.

It's not just about indulging my will, though. It's about testing myself without having any fallback. No one else to confer with or lean on when things go wrong, no one to brainstorm with if something breaks, no one to choose a course or to figure out where we went off course and what point on the chart that huge tower actually is. It will just be me.

When the wind picks up or the boat gets grounded, I alone will have to fix it. If you want to know yourself, to truly know of what you are capable, you have to put yourself in those situations where there is a chance that you are in over your head. It is only then that you can find the outer extents of what you are capable of. If you never get to the end of your rope, how can you ever know how long it is?

I hope I am able to find that point so that I can come back knowing that I can handle anything this pedestrian, land-locked life can throw my way. We will have to wait and see...

Practical Dreams

Sometimes I dream big, owning my own private island with a dock out front and at least four boats tied up to it right next to a perfect right point break and a private tutor to come school the kids for six hours a day while I write and sail and surf everyday. Sometimes I dream a little more practically.

Owning a MacGregor 26 is more of this kind of a dream. It's got an affordable sticker price, can be trailered so I don't have to pay slip fees, and it is virtually maintenance free if you don't count scrubbing jelly off the deck from my kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

And it is the perfect boat for my Florida trip. It can sail in just 12 inches of water, it has solid

foam flotation so that even if you drill a hole in the bottom it won't sink, not that I'm planning on doing that, and it is totally self-righting so in the rare chance I might be knocked over by a rouge wave, it will pop right back up. You can throw a motor on the boat and go so fast that a harbor would be within minutes if I got word that the weather is making a turn for the worse.

As I was perusing the MacGregor website, as I do on a regular basis, I noticed that Captain Mike Inmon who runs the MacGregor factory has an offer for a free DVD if you go visit the factory. Maybe it was all of the old books I had read or maybe just my imagination, but, I was always under the impression that all the boat builders were in some old wooden garage somewhere tucked away on the East Coast. So when I found out MacGregor was only a 45 minute drive from my house and that I was more than welcome to stop by at any time and learn how they made a boat out of rolls of fiberglass and resin, I put a visit on my calendar.

Last Friday I made the drive up to Newport Beach and paid a visit to Captain Mike. He greeted me with warmth like a proud papa excited to see me and show me all that his factory held. We started where the boats start with rolls and rolls of fiberglass. As we walked through the factory we followed along just as a boat would from fiberglass and resin to full completed boat ready to be shipped anywhere in the world and I watched as all these pieces were slowly and masterfully worked into a piece of art.

Every hole was cut with precision and every piece perfectly cut to line up with the plan exactly. And it all made for a boat that was precise. One that was exactly as it had been designed to be with no room for human error.

We walked into the room where they poured the resin and I at once felt at home. I have spent countless hours bathed in the smell of resin and fiberglass while fixing surfboards over the last twenty years (ok, that just made me feel a little old) and it's a smell that, to this day, reminds me of having the space and time to think. Fixing surfboards was a great excuse to get outside in a place where others would be driven away by the smell and how, while my hands would work the glass, my mind was free to wander.

I think solo sailing has such a strong pull on my life for the very same reason. With days on end without another human for miles, my mind can drift on the wind, finding new places to go and new solutions to years old problems. It will be a time to sift over the pain and friction Diabetes can inflict on a life and try to draw some sense out of it all. To find a purpose in all of it and then to turn that purpose into a life story to share with other people who have Diabetes or the ones who love someone with it or those who deal with the kind of friction that comes when a body can't provide as much as the mind wants it to.

I knew with that smell that I had been joined to these boats, hopefully, starting a long relationship with one of them that will carry me through my journey and provide the place I need to make sense of it all. We finished our tour and as we sat in Captain Mike's office chatting for a bit, once again I realized how this trip has opened doors to share with people what little I have figured out about the technology of my disease and living with it and how common it is for people to be affected by illness.

I left with my promised DVD in hand and a better view of how big this trip can be and how far it can reach and I have Captain Mike Inmon to thank for that.

Pancakes and Christine Colby

Today I made pancakes. Lots of small, dollar-sized pancakes. And today I served them to my seven-year-old daughter and her friend who slept over last night. Shea and Julia, today, are the same age I was when I would wake to a hundred tiny, dollar-sized pancakes and bacon, and being the same age, we ate them all.

Today, I served up those same pancakes without the bacon (Shea has been a self-proclaimed vegetarian since the age of three). Today I became Christine Colby and I couldn't have been happier.

You know those moments in your life when you stop and look at yourself as if from the outside and realize you had become the people you had looked up to for so long. The first realization came during my first year teaching at Santa Ana High School. Being barely older than the students themselves, I often felt like I was playing dress-up wearing business suits to try to hide my youthful appearance. I had been chased out of the office a time or two because someone thought I was still a student. During the first test I gave, while my students were working hard, while I was walking around the classroom to try to catch the cheaters, I had a moment to realize what had happened.

Without me knowing it and without really ever planning on it, I had become a teacher. I was the one who held their grades in my hand, who they had to try to fool to get away with their cheating, the one who a few of them looked up to as knowing everything in the world about science (little did they know I had never taken an earth science class in my life.)

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I wasn't overwhelmed with pride at having achieved my goal in life; I never set out to be a teacher. I wasn't excited at the power I now held to allow a student to use the restroom only when I deemed it a good time; I never really liked having to ask to use the bathroom when I was in school and I certainly felt a little weird when students felt they had to ask me. I was just startled that I had become an adult without even noticing it or really ever wanting it.

The second time I just had to laugh. It was one of those times when that old saying I heard a thousand times as a child had come flying out of my mouth without ever having a chance to stop it. Shea had been standing at the fridge for at least five minutes thinking that, maybe, if she stared at it long enough, some item of food would stand up and scream, "Hey, if you put a little of me on that loaf of bread on the bottom shelf over there, and then spread some of my neighbor, Mr.Jelly, on another slice, you might just have a sandwich that would fill the hole in your belly."

The peanut butter never spoke up and so she sat with the door wide open waiting. Then the words flew past my lips without waiting for my mind to approve. "Shut the refrigerator door. You'll let all the cold air out."

And, in a flash, I had become not only my parents, but, every set of parents form the baby boomer generation that were counting every penny wasted by leaving that fridge door open. The same parents who reminded us of the plight of the starving kids in Africa when we were full and didn't want to eat food just because it had been placed on our plates (maybe, if we hadn't been told to clear our plates every night, we may not have the obesity epidemic we have in America now.)

I had now, with one exclamation, become one of the thousands who had gone before me who are suddenly enraged at the thought of cold air escaping the bounds of the fridge. I had unwittingly become the parent of the sitcom, and I had to laugh at myself.

Today, however, was a moment I had looked forward to for years. It was one I had pursued and one I was ready to embrace. You see Christine Colby was not like most of the other moms. She liked music and had favorite movies. She went to concerts and took vacations with her girlfriends and traveled. She did stuff She had a life.

And at the same time she never let it take away from her kids or her husband. She was one of the few moms that was a real person outside of being a mom. Maybe she was the only mom who let us kids see her outside life, but I think she may have been one of the only ones who actually had a life.

Now that I have kids of my own and know people with kids, I see far too many women who lose themselves in their kids. Their entire lives become about those kids. They do for them and love them and they do a great job, but, even when they have a moment to be with other adults they still talk only about the kids. They never do anything for themselves, they have no hobbies or interests outside the kids. And then when the kids grow up and go off to college they are left with themselves, but, they have forgotten who they were and have no idea of where to start looking again.

Christine was never one of those women. I knew from the time I was eight that she was the kind of mom I wanted to be. I wanted to travel with my girlfriends. I wanted to ski. I wanted to be a person despite the fact that I was a mom.

And I wanted to be a really good mom, just like Christine. One who invited the neighborhood kids over and who was really close to her kids, who was always there when they had a problem and offer really good advice. A mom who let her kids take all of the quarters she saved in a 5-gallon arrowhead jar when they wanted to bike to the local pizza joint and get a slice. A mom who planned great birthday parties and who worked the snack shack at the softball field. I wanted to make homemade pizzas every Friday for family movie night.

And I wanted to make hundreds of tiny, dollar-sized pancakes when my daughter has her friends over for sleepovers. It's the one part of becoming an adult I have not accepted begrudgingly, but, have looked forward to with anticipation for years and am so glad to now say that I have become. Today I became just like Christine Colby and I couldn't be happier.